Frequently Asked Questions

The world of Shadowrun is a dangerous place, especially for runners. Normal ambulances tend to shy away from firefights and magical fireworks, so smart runners subscribe to Doc Wagon™, a service that provides heavily armed medical extraction teams to swoop in and save their ass and deliver emergency medical attention.

In the game, this free Doc Wagon subscription (game money, not real money) will help keep your character and friendly NPC’s alive. This is important, because if one of your NPCs is killed during a mission, you can’t use that NPC again.

In real life, the Gold and Platinum cards let people know that you're a badass willing to contribute to The Cause. In-game, we'll likely up the free service.

The level editor will be the one we use to make the game—ugly and powerful. (In other words, it’s about as far from the polished Little Big Planet editor as conceivable.) But we believe in you. If we can use it, you can use it, right? Then again, with some additional funding, we might be able to put some lipstick on it.

We are setting the game in the 2050 era of the Shadowrun timeline. We chose this setting because it’s the one that we originally created and the one that the fans of the SNES and Sega Genesis know and love.

In 2007, Microsoft published a game called Shadowrun for Xbox and PC. The game was a unique and innovative first person shooter but it took way too many liberties with the Shadowrun story and mythology. As a result, the game “was not received well by fans.” Jordan’s partner, Mitch Gitelman, was the Executive Producer on the game and with Shadowrun Returns, he’s taking his shot at redemption. Let’s all be supportive of this mythic journey back from the dark side.

For mobile tablets, Shadowrun Returns will be available via iTunes, Android Marketplace, and the Amazon Android marketplace. For PC/Mac/Linux, the game will be available DRM-free from our website. We are also looking into a Steam release (and potentially Humble Bundle as well).

While the details are still being worked out, we hate draconian DRM as much as the next guy. We expect there will be an account system but it would be primarily used to enable the social elements of the game like mission and character sharing--not to restrict access to the game itself.

Unfortunately, the app stores make it very difficult for independent game developers to give away free game this way, so we had to go with PC/Mac/Linux only. We've heard about other teams investigating ways of doing this but they haven't succeeded yet, so stay tuned.

Shadowrun Online is a 3D in-browser, mission based MMO with an emphasis on co-op and PvP gameplay being developed by Cliffhanger Productions and scheduled for release in mid-2013. The game is set in the 2070 era of Shadowrun and will pick up on some of the plotlines and characters in our game, Shadowrun Returns, which is set in 2050.

In many areas of Europe, you can use your Visa Debit or Visa Electron cards to pay online.

If you don't have a credit card or debit card that Amazon accepts, there are other ways you can pledge.

First, buy a Ukash voucher, then convert it into a Ukash NEO pre-paid Mastercard. From there, you can use it with Amazon's payment system.

(Thanks to our friends at Double Fine for the pointers!)

Another option is to get a "Virtual Visa Card". This is a pre-paid virtual card designed for Europeans to purchase things on the internet. You can find more information about it here: http://www.visaeurope.com/en/cardholders/virtual_cards.aspx

If you are a non-US Amazon Mechanical Turk user you may experience a problem trying to pledge. We've alerted Amazon about this bug. Sorry this is annoying. Please view these instructions to pledge: https://www.jungledisk.com/secure/signup/mturk.aspx.

Let's start here--Shadowrun was never about the rules. It's about the game world. If you need proof, look at the 1st Edition rules. They were. . . lacking. But the world caught on and the rules improved. So we intend to be true to the world and take our rule cues from the 2nd and 3rd Editions. They best represent the 2050 era time frame.

We'll run a backers-only survey after our Kickstarter time period ends (4/28/2012). (Kickstarter doesn't allow backer-only surveys before then and we want to be sure to keep the decision purely for backers.)

As we scan your posts across the boards and forums, a few cities seem to rise to the top: Berlin, Chicago, Denver, London and Washington DC. We're still listening and there's still plenty of time left for debate.

Adepts, the modern-day ninjas and berserkers, use magic to enhance the body’s abilities. An Adept's powers (magical abilities) become a natural part of the adept through study and training - the adept’s way is one of intense training and self-discipline.